Visigoths Take Rome, A.D. 410
“Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.” —Daniel 2:35
Visigoths Take Rome, A.D. 410
mpires and tribes come and go throughout history. The prophet Daniel boldly predicted the rise of the following few empires, each of which would succumb to a stronger foe. The last of his imperial forecast is generally accepted as the Roman Empire, led by the “Eternal City” of Rome. When the Roman legions expanded their empire by conquest through Gaul, they came into contact with a variety of tribes who supplied Rome’s enemies with weapons, raided across the Rhine River against Roman strongholds, and refused to submit to Roman rule. Julius Caesar in the 1st Century BC referred to those people as the Germani. He bridged the Rhine and carried out punitive expeditions against them; Augustus tried to establish Roman hegemony in Germania Antiqua in 7 BC. In 9 AD, a Roman-trained German ally named Arminius led a Roman army under General Varus into a huge ambush, which wiped out the VII, VIII, and XIX Legions in the Teutoburg Forest (probably in Lower Saxony), killing 15,000-20,000 Romans and auxiliaries.
Germanic troops under Arminius attack and decisively defeat Roman troops under Varus at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD
Revenge campaigns into Germania recovered the lost Roman Standards in succeeding years, but the Rhine remained the important dividing line between Roman Territory and the German tribes across that river and the Elbe. From the first to the fourth century, trade flourished between Rome and Germania, with occasional clashes between certain tribes and Romans. In the fourth and fifth centuries, a nomadic German people known as the Goths fought against Roman rule. A breakaway tribe, the Visigoths, under pressure from a central Asian nomadic people, known as the Huns, forced them off their land. With permission from Valens, the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Visigoths settled across the Danube River in Roman territory. The taxes levied by the Romans with the duplicitous treatment they endured, caused the Germanic settlers to revolt and plunder the Balkan provinces of Rome. The Visigoths faced the Roman army on the plains of Adrianople in 378, where they slaughtered the Romans and killed the emperor in battle.
Roman Emperor Valens (328-378)
An elaborate relief depicting a battle between Roman and Germanic peoples
For several more years the Visigoths wandered in search of a land in which to live. The new Emperor offered them the province of Moesia, where they settled and converted to Arianism, a heresy that denied the deity of Christ but accepted most other Christian beliefs. Roman Emperor Theodosius welcomed Visigoth leader Alaric into an alliance in which the latter led an army against the Franks who had risen against the Romans again. Although a Roman citizen, Alaric did not receive the recognition and reward that he deserved for his military successes. With the death of the Roman emperor and the breakdown of the Roman field forces, Alaric returned to Moesia as “king of the Visigoths.” In 408, Alaric laid siege to Rome with 30,000 men. After negotiation with the Senate, the starving Romans paid a large ransom and Alaric left, but not till he also liberated 40,000 Gothic slaves.
Theodosius I (347-395) was Roman Emperor from 379 to 395
Alaric I (c. 370-410) was the first king of the Visigoths, from 395 to 410
The first decade of the fifth century had already proven disastrous for the Roman Empire. Vandals, Sueves, and Alans crossed the Rhine into Gaul. Britain rose in rebellion. Alaric took the occasion to invade Noricum (modern Austria) and demanded 4,000 pounds in gold to not invade Italy again. General Stillicho—ruling regent of the western empire—paid the shake-down money, perhaps hoping to use Alaric against his multiplying enemies. A bureaucrat of the emperor betrayed and murdered General Stillicho, thus eliminating Alaric as an ally. Olympius, the same bureaucrat, had tens of thousands of Goth wives and children of Gothic soldiers serving in the Roman army put to death. 30,000 Gothic soldiers defected to Alaric. Denied recognition by Emperor Honorius, acceptance of the Visigoths within the empire, and perhaps, thwarted for imperial office, Alaric marched into Rome on August 24, A.D. 410, and turned his soldiers loose for three days to sack the Eternal City. Imperial Rome had finally fallen to “barbarians.”
Flavius Stilicho (c. 359-408) was a military commander in the Roman army who, for a time, became the most powerful man in the Western Roman Empire
The burial of Alaric in the bed of the Busento River
n September 2, 1945, Japan signed the “instrument of surrender” to the Allied forces, aboard the battleship USS Missouri. The United States hoped that the war would have drawn to a close after the eighty-two day battle of Okinawa April through June, which had cost Japan about 110,000 killed and the destruction of more than 1,400 aircraft and sixteen naval warships, compared to some 20,000 American dead, 763 aircraft lost and twenty-three ships sunk. A post-war Japanese memorial on Okinawa contains the names of 240,734 dead, which includes more than 40,000 civilians who died in the campaign. While the Americans planned the invasion of the main Japanese islands over the next two months, and conducted a “conventional” firebombing campaign against Japanese cities, almost obliterating forty-two of them, they also explored diplomatic means to end the war with the unconditional surrender of Japan.
American military personnel gather in Paris on August 15, 1945 to celebrate the unconditional surrender of the Japanese
The Enola Gay and some of her crew—Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk is third from left
homas Watson was one of the best known and most reprinted preachers in England’s history. On August 17, 1662 he preached his last sermon to the congregation he had served as pastor for the previous sixteen years, St. Stephens, Walbrook. Little is known of his early years or personal history, but we assume his birth around 1620 in Yorkshire. He first appears as a student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where tradition says he was an intense scholar, completing his Master of Arts in 1642. Watson’s life parallels in the same time period many famous Puritan preachers in Britain—John Owen, Richard Baxter, Thomas Brookes, John Bunyan, Robert Traill, Samuel Rutherford, and many others of note.
n listing the American Presidents in order, the one left out most often in the 20th Century is Gerald Ford. Part of the reason may be that he conducted no campaign to become either President or Vice President, nor did he receive a single vote to obtain that office. His achievement could only have occurred the way it did. Some people today think the United States may experience a similar outcome though for different reasons with the current holder of the highest office in the land.
The gunnery officers of the USS Monterey; Ford is second from the right, in the front row
Gerald and Betty Ford escort Richard and Pat Nixon from the White House to a waiting helicopter on August 9, 1974, following Nixon’s resignation from the presidency
n 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” we learned in our earliest days in school. Leaving aside that the little rhyme to get children to remember the year Columbus “discovered America,” the doggerel now triggers the sensitive but ignorant imbeciles that consider “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” Christopher Columbus, as the white supremacist perpetrator of a holocaust in the New World. It just so happens that another event, perhaps more important than the exploration of C. Columbus, took place the same year in the same country: the expulsion of the substantial Jewish population of Spain. The action created another Jewish diaspora that changed history.
